Monday, August 17, 2015

Melanie Reviews: Dragonfish

Vu Tran’s first novel, Dragonfish,
which was just released August 3, 2015, has been in the works for years. Tran
came to my alma mater in 2012 and read a chapter of the manuscript before it
was even accepted for publication. I enjoyed that excerpt from what has been
dubbed “literary noir,” and eagerly awaited the final product.

Dragonfish is the
story of a cop, Robert, in the United States, who was married to Suzy for 8
years. Suzy, a refugee from Vietnam, is a strange woman who seems to lose
connection with reality, and has done so since the before she met Robert. The
novel is broken into italicized and non-italicized sections. Though the italics
are never given a named narrator, readers learn the pages come from Suzy’s
diary. She wrote while in Vietnam and then some years later looking back on her
time in Vietnam, and these passages were the most interesting. They give depth
to Suzy and suggest motive for her strange behavior in the U.S., which is
totally lacking from the non-italicized sections.

The non-italicized sections are from Robert’s point of view.
He confesses Suzy is the name he calls his wife, whose real name is Hong, and
that he chose the name because it belonged to an ex-girlfriend. Even when he
takes his wife on honeymoon, they end up at a restaurant where he once went on a
date. This weird connection of Suzy to ex-girlfriends is never played out,
which makes the references seem odd, like they show something about Robert that
I was never fully able to puzzle out.

The real action results from Suzy’s absence; she has left
her new husband, Sonny, who is also from Vietnam, and Sonny wants her back.
Sonny’s son “Junior” employs Robert (okay, “Junior” has his men kidnap Robert
for some shenanigans he pulled 5 months before) to help him, and this detective
work following a mysterious disappearance is what makes Dragonfish noir.

While the novel was quite a page-turner, I was never certain
why Robert loved his ex-wife so much. When he recounts moments from their past,
they’re dark, violent, and Suzy’s actions hardly make sense from his point of
view. Robert’s obsession, the kind I would expect from a heartbroken
ex-husband, didn’t seem to make sense based on his description of his marriage.
During his time searching for Suzy, Robert risks his career, and I had a hard
time believing he would do that for a woman who was more responsibility than
wife.

There is a darkness in Dragonfish
that I had not expected, one that revealed itself in flashbacks. Not only
were Suzy’s and Sonny’s lives as refugees defined by death and sadness, but
Robert’s own childhood added a dark layer to his personality, one that could
explain his own tendency toward violence or anger. Tran’s choice to add trauma
to the lives of the characters were part of what kept me turning pages:

“When I was six, I watched my father grab my brown terrier
by the collar and slam it headfirst against our porch wall. It had pissed on
his shoe--this, after a month of him warning me of his messes around the house.
It instantly went limp and he held it up and looked at it and walked to our
curbside trash can. Hours later we heard scratching at our front door, and
there it was, limping sleepily around the welcome mat.”

The narrator of noir is almost always jaded, and Robert’s
problems stemming from his childhood family and rematerializing in his adult
family made perfect sense. When Robert is kidnapped by Sonny’s men to be taken
to Vegas to search for Suzy, one of the hired men astutely points out the
emptiness of Robert’s life: “This is a sad place, man. Not even a Christmas
tree?”

No one really seems to understand Suzy, though she is the
focus of the novel. The book shows the
reader a lot about the depression from which she suffers, but never fully
analyzes it. Robert thinks about Suzy’s medication: “[Sonny] must have treated
those [anxiety] pills like I used to, like they were magic. Take them and voila! you become your old self again,
or someone else entirely, someone new and preferable--though the truth is that
that broken person inside you still lives and breathes and merely hibernates
until reawakened.” Since no one knows much about this woman--it doesn’t seem
that anyone’s read her diary other than the reader--it’s hard to fathom what’s
at stake. Why do Sonny and Robert care or feel invested in a woman neither
truly know?

In the end, Dragonfish
has the ability to disappoint readers. Things aren’t wrapped up like the
finale of Clue, and we’re all going
to be guessing. But the way Tran weaves stories of loss, ghosts, culture shock,
and detective work is sure to please readers while they’re on the ride.

Melanie Page has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is an adjunct instructor in Indiana. She is the creator of Grab the Lapels, a site that publishes book reviews and interviews of folks who identify as women at grabthelapels.com.

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I have been buried beneath small press and self-published review copies since 2009. My passion for supporting the small press and self publishing communities has driven me out into the world wide web to demonstrate alternative ways to spread the word about amazing publishers, authors, and novels you might never had heard of. Feeding your reading addiction, one book at a time.